


In The Pines

by papofglencoe



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:11:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5846323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papofglencoe/pseuds/papofglencoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had no plan, no strategy. In her drunken stupor she’d vowed to walk the hundred miles to Aberdeen if she had to. Once she got there, who could say what she’d do or how she’d live? Maybe she’d wait tables and give guys ten dollar blowjobs on the side. Anything would be better than here. Anything would be better than this.</p><p>Nothing can hurt you when there’s no one left that you love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Pines

**Author's Note:**

> Rated M for explicit language, sexual situations, violence, and horror. Trigger warnings: infidelity, horror, and assault.
> 
> With many thanks to my betas and dear friends @dandelion-sunset and @jennagill. For @myusernamehere. Merry Christmas, my dear, twisted, lovely friend. Thank you for appreciating the dark side too. You’re my fucking tempo.
> 
> Lyrics by unknown, as performed by Nirvana.

_My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me,_

_Tell me where did you sleep last night?_

_In the pines, in the pines,_

_Where the sun don’t ever shine,_

_I would shiver the whole night through._

 

 

Her fingers sifted through the loose dirt, frantic and searching, until they brushed upon something cool and metal.

\-------

 

The wet pavement glowed red in the night, reflecting the glare of the flashing stoplight as it swayed overhead in the wind. The light creaked on its line, a tedious, repetitive sound that broke the silence looming over the desolate town.

It was the only stoplight for sixty miles in either direction, a sad vestige of humanity’s attempt to tame the wilderness that surrounded the town of Panem— if you could call this glorified rest stop, bumfuck sort-of-place a town. Maybe it once was, back when the loggers and the mills sawed and ground and hacked the pines into submission.

But the wilderness couldn’t be tamed. Not here, where it lived and breathed, where the ocean thundered to the west, the winter gales shearing the trees and people alike into bent, craggly shapes huddled against the wind. Where, to the east, the mountains hulked, hurtling avalanches so violently down to the earth from their glaciated peaks that the ground trembled and quaked. Where it rained almost every day of the year and a wall of stinking fog blinded and choked anyone unlucky enough to pass through.

She felt as abandoned as the town, although she was the one walking away. It wasn’t too late to turn around, to go back to him. But what self-respect would she have left if she did? If she closed her eyes she could still see the lines of his bare ass, the way it undulated, the muscles flexing, as he fucked _her_ in their bed. It wasn’t something that could be unseen or unknown. She could hear his protestations as he chased after her, the way he screamed her name. It was more real to her now than the wind howling in her ears.

Her heels clacked noisily on the uneven asphalt, and she cursed as she rolled her ankle on its uneven surface. She knew she looked like a fucking prostitute, shambling drunkenly along the side of the road in the dark, her tights torn at the knees from where he’d dragged her, her knuckles bloodied and raw from punching him. She clawed at her skirt, willing it to cover more of her legs, and she shivered in the rainy night, feeling naked and exposed.

She had no plan, no strategy. In her drunken stupor, she’d vowed to walk the hundred miles to Aberdeen if she had to. Once she got there, who could say what she’d do or how she’d live? Maybe she’d wait tables and give guys ten dollar blowjobs on the side. Anything would be better than here. Anything would be better than this.

Nothing can hurt you when there’s no one left that you love.

The rain plastered the dark tendrils of her hair to her face, making them appear as black as an oil slick. Rivulets of water cascaded down the sides of her face, dripping off the tip of her nose and from her eyelashes into her eyes, blinding her. She didn’t care. She could drown out here, washed away in a landslide, and she wouldn’t fucking care.

As she staggered along the shoulder of the empty highway, the dense wall of fog in front of her lit up from the headlights of an approaching car. She glanced over her shoulder to see who it was, to make sure _he_ hadn’t followed her. An old rusted pickup truck, too shabby and weather-beaten to be called anything so charming as vintage, crawled along the road. It’s plates were in-state, but the unfamiliar car was decidedly out-of-town. She allowed herself to exhale in relief. _Not him_.

Before she could think better of it, she extended her left arm, hitching up her thumb to bum a ride. It was a long shot, maybe even suicide, but without money or decent walking shoes her options were limited.

The truck pulled to a stop alongside her, the clutch groaning in protest as the driver shifted the car into neutral. She leaned forward to squint through the passenger window, trying to get a look through the rain-soaked glass at who was driving, but all she could make out was the shape of a man— someone with broad, muscular shoulders.

She could see him lean forward across the bench seat, pushing open the passenger door with one solid swing. The door squealed on its hinges as if it hadn’t been opened in years, like the truck was jealously protecting its sole claim on the driver’s company.

Her pulse raced violently in her ears, thundering like the overhead sky. Every muscle in her body tightened in anxiety, her tendons and ligaments threatening to snap from the strain, her body an over-tuned instrument striking an unnaturally shrill chord.

Through the gaping maw of the open door, she could finally see the driver, her tension subsiding the instant she saw him. Maybe it was his boyish good looks, his sweet smile with just a touch of shyness, the slight cleft to his chin, his wavy, unkempt blond hair, or some combination thereof, but at the sight of him an unexpected warmth rushed through her. In his black Sub Pop t-shirt and ratty flannel he looked like every guy she’d ever known, a real hometown boy, but then she’d never quite seen anyone so attractive as him before, either. He was a blend of the familiar and the strange, inspiring a feeling in her that could only be described as uncanny.

She walked up to the open door, leaning her palms onto the grubby, worn upholstery. “Do I know you from somewhere?” She bit her lip, trying to puzzle it out. Maybe she’d seen him before at a football game, a player from a visiting school maybe. With a build like that, he could’ve played ball once.

He frowned at the question, his warm blue eyes scanning her face as if to ask the same thing, but he didn’t answer. “Hey yourself. You’re soaked. Why don’t you hop on in?” His tone was solicitous, gentle.

She complied, sliding in ass first so that he wouldn’t notice the raw flesh on her knees. He waited for her to slam the door shut and strap in before shifting gears and resuming his path down the empty road.

“Thanks for picking me up,” she told him. “I could’ve been there a while.”

He nodded once, acknowledging and dismissing the gratitude in a single gesture. “How far do you need to go?”

There was no point, she knew, for him to ask which way she was going, or for her to ask him. “Aberdeen. But I’ll go as far as you’re willing to take me.” Her fingers toyed with the frayed hem of her skirt, worrying and distressing the fabric until she had enough thread to wrap a puller around her finger.

“Works for me. I’m headed to Olympia anyway. I can just drop you off on the way.”

She liked the sound of his voice— it was soft-spoken and low, reassuring. With a voice like that, it wouldn’t matter what he said so long as he was capable of speech. A voice like that made you feel like you were old friends.

“I’m Peeta, by the way. What’s your name?” He pried his eyes off the road to look at her, his gaze falling to her bloodied knuckles. He must have had the sense not to ask her what had happened. His eyes flitted away, resuming his careful watch of the road, silently waiting for her reply.

When she finally spoke, it was a lie. She gave him the name of her dead sister, although _any_ of their names would have worked. Running away like she just had— well, there could be a missing person report, she reasoned. It was better that Peeta didn’t know her real name, couldn’t phone the police with a well-meaning tip that would disastrously return her to the shitty life she wanted to forget. No, she wanted to vanish forever and completely, to die as herself and begin a new life as someone else.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you. It seems like I’ve been driving forever on this damn road.”

“I bet.” She chanced a look his way, taking in the strong cut of his jaw, sharp as a logger’s blade, and the way his soft hair blew in the breeze of the window he’d left cracked open. In the dim light his eyes looked so clear they matched the milky pallor of the fog. He didn’t seem to notice her furtive appraisal of him as he reached his hand down, grabbing the coffee cup from between his knees, and took a healthy swig of whatever was in it.

She couldn’t help but make a scoffing sound. She’d lived here long enough to know that sometimes the only way to warm your bones was to pound whatever cheap liquor you could get your hands on. Didn’t matter when you drank. Or where. You did it just to get by. But it didn’t make it right.

He held the cup up, swishing it around. “Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “It’s not alcohol or anything, although god knows that would help pass the time.” When she didn’t laugh, he added, “Just tea. Honest. Got this back in PA.”

There was something so familiar about him she was certain she could trace the outline of his face, even in her dreams. Maybe that’s how she knew him— from Port Angeles. “Is that where you’re from?” she asked, trying to sound casual, running a thumb tenderly over the jagged flesh of her knuckles.

He shook his head. “No— uh-uh.” Another swig, this time finishing off the tea. He tossed the cup behind his seat without looking or caring where it fell. “I’m from Gold Bar,” he explained. “Ever hear of it?” He flashed her a grin, the sight so much more brilliant than anything she had ever seen here at the end of the world.

She gnawed her lip, chewing so furiously she could taste the sharp metallic blood seeping from her splitting skin. “Yeah,” she said, surprising even herself. “Guess I have. ‘S that an old mining town, out toward Stevens Pass?”

“Yeah.” His eyebrows darted up, and when he spoke he sounded pleased. “Well,” he amended, his voice falling, “it used to be, anyway. It’s not much of anything anymore.”

“Same as here,” she muttered, scowling in the rearview mirror toward the shadows that had swallowed her town.

Peeta pressed on, even though she hadn’t asked. He obviously enjoyed conversation, whereas she would have preferred to sit in silence. “Everyone just lives in Monroe now,” he explained, “on account of the prison. They’ve got all the jobs. Lots of prisoners, so business is good, I guess.”

He glanced at her, and when he did she noticed the dark shadows ringing his eyes, so deep it made him look like he had black eyes. She didn’t know how long he’d been driving, but she guessed he could use a break.

“Is that where you work— the prison?”

He laughed and scratched at the back of his head, his nails dragging noisily on his scalp. “Hell no… I couldn’t see myself in a place like that.” He shuddered. “Too depressing, don’t you think?”

Fixing her eyes in the rearview mirror again to avoid staring at him— he really was startlingly attractive— she absentmindedly muttered, “I wouldn’t know.” Or maybe she’d know better than anyone else, since her life had been nothing to her but a never-ending prison sentence, solitary confinement since _they’d_ died.

Silence stretched on between them for several minutes, neither one of them attempting to break it. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. And, the thing was, she was okay at saying something. He just wouldn’t like anything she had to say. But he’d rescued her in the dead of the night, and he seemed pleasant enough, so she supposed she should at least try to be polite to him.

“So what do you do then?” she asked, not quite interested enough to be called curious, but not disinterested either.

His thumbs tapped restlessly on the steering wheel, his hands positioned at 10 and 2 o’clock like a good boy or some fucking well-trained dog. The sleeves of his flannel had been hastily rolled, and she couldn’t help but appreciate his muscled forearms, the fine blond hair that covered their expanse. “I— ah— used to decorate the cakes at my parents’ bakery.”

She cocked an eyebrow at his use of past tense. “ _Used_ to?”

“Yeah. The bakery… it’s gone now,” he explained. His voice was forlorn, his expression impossibly sad. Something in the words aged him, made him seem like some ancient, forgotten relic of a lost race.

“What happened?” she pressed, her voice a mere whisper, afraid to touch his sacred pain.

“There was a fire.” He paused as if searching for the right words and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously in his throat. “The ovens had been left on… We lived above the bakery, and my parents… they didn’t survive.”

Her heart constricted painfully in her chest at his words, bleeding and writhing for him. She knew a thing or two about dead parents. “I’m sorry,” she said, two of the most worthless words in the English language.

Peeta shot her a rueful smile. “Don’t be. It’s not like it was your fault.”

“It wasn’t _anyone’s_ ,” she reminded him, resisting the urge to place her hand comfortingly over one of his.

When he didn’t reply, they fell back into silence. There was only the splattering of rain on the windshield, the rhythmic squeaking of the rubber wiper blades on the glass, the whistling of wind as it rushed in through the cracked window, the pelting of the tires against the concrete. The silence between them was pregnant with something, but she couldn’t be sure what. Maybe he was too shy to ask her questions about her life. Which was entirely for the best. It saved her from having to lie.

He cleared his throat and pointed toward the radio. “Mind it I turn on some music?”

She smiled at him, matching the grin that had quirked onto his lips. “Not at all.”

The radio crackled to life, the antique tuner humming with static. The strains of an acoustic guitar filled the cab of the truck, the dark melody striking every chord of her heart. She knew this song, every word of it, every note. It had been one of her father’s favorites. Her father, who’d owned a shotgun too. The song was elegiac and mournful, and when the singer howled that he would shiver the whole night through, his voice shattering into pieces, she knew it was the sound of a man giving his own wake. Betrayed, alone, and empty. Hateful and dying.

She knew a thing or two about that.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Peeta asked, watching her from the corner of his eye.

“Hearing it— yeah,” she replied, mostly to herself.

Peeta shook his head, his voice calling her back to him. “No. I mean betrayal.”

She ran a finger along her lower lip, remembering the way it had felt to be kissed by a faithless lover, to feel his warm lips pressed against hers in an empty and broken promise. Closing her eyes, she couldn’t help but see _her_ face, contorted in pleasure, eyes squeezed shut. The blue neon light of the adjacent bar as it filtered in through slit of the curtains, coloring her hair a grotesque shade of purple. The tangled sheets and her clutched fists. And _his_ hair— his hair was bronze as always. He was a golden god, plundering and taking what he wanted, as the gods always did.

And what he had wanted all along was Annie Cresta. He’d never wanted her. She knew that now.

In the silence of the car she could still hear the sound of his pelvis smacking against Annie’s ass as he forcefully drove into her from behind, the way he growled and Annie moaned. She could hear herself cry out in the doorway, a strangled, aborted sound.

She looked at Peeta, searching his profile to understand what it was he knew of betrayal. “It hurts,” she admitted, but if he had asked more she couldn’t possibly begin to explain where the pain was rooted.

Love was a weird thing, a senseless act of violence against ourselves. It was nothing but madness and self-destruction. “You think you know someone,” she admitted. “You think they love you. But do you know what I think?”

His blue eyes locked on her for a moment. She could read desperation in his eyes, his burning need to know what she thought.

She continued. “I think love is a lie. It’s not real.”

He hung his head noticeably at her words, and when he spoke he sounded like a young child, dejected and beaten. “It’s not real?”

“No,” she told him. “It’s not real.”

The entire world around her was black and dank, covered in a shroud of fog, an unwelcoming and hostile place. There was no love in it. No kindness. Those were merely fairy tales and lullabies we told ourselves to sleepwalk through life’s horrors.

She could see his jaw clench and roll as her words sank in, the way his hands tightened on the steering wheel, knuckles whitening. “No,” Peeta agreed, “It’s not real.” His entire demeanor changed at the admission, his boyishness and sweetness dispelling into the darkness. The tension in his body radiated off him into hers, seeping in through her pores and lodging in her bones. For the first time she could feel how close his body was to hers. She could feel how physical a presence he was.

“Maybe we’re not liars like they are,” she said, pretending not to notice the surprise in his face as she took in the surroundings of the cab more fully.

You could tell a lot about a person from their car, and she wanted to know more about this person.

The interior of the truck was as beaten as the exterior, the fabric upholstery of the seat rent in several places from years of wear and tear. But the truck was otherwise tidy and uncluttered. If Peeta was traveling with baggage it must have been in the truck bed, undoubtedly soaked through by now. A rabbit’s foot, dyed a faded orange, dangled from the rearview mirror by a grubby double-knotted shoelace.

She reached out and gently stroked the rabbit’s foot. “I haven’t seen one of these in ages,” she mused nostalgically, thinking of summers spent traveling with her family in their station wagon, stopping off at western-themed gift shops to buy whatever knicknacks a couple dollars panhandled off her parents could buy. “I didn’t know they still made these. Where’d you get it?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, and when he spoke he sounded as irritated as he looked. “Please don’t touch that.”

She retracted her hand, feeling stung. Apparently, she’d said something to upset him— touched upon some sore subject. She didn’t know where the conversation had taken a turn, but because she didn’t feel like walking the next sixty-some odd miles to Aberdeen, she thought it would be best if she said nothing more at all unless he initiated it first.

The radio droned on, but Peeta made no attempt to talk to her over the music. He gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, a stony expression masking his face. She rolled onto her right hip, curling up a little to rest her head against the window. Exhaustion and fatigue overwhelmed her.

There’s no way to say how long she slept or what woke her up first: her forehead knocking against the glass of the window from the bumpy road or Peeta arguing with himself.

“What— where are we?” she asked groggily, wiping the sleep from the corners of her eyes. Through the window all she could see was darkness and fog weakly punctuated by the two narrow beams of light from the truck. From what she could tell, they were driving down an unpaved forest road, and perhaps had been for some time. The hulking trunks of Sitka spruce and hemlocks stood sentinel on each side of the road, long strands of moss dangling from their limbs as if to bar access to the dense forest beyond them.

Peeta had been muttering unintelligibly under his breath, something that sounded like “not real, not real,” but as he realized she had awoken, he directed his invective toward her.

He headed her off. “There’s no point talking to me. I know you’re a fucking liar.”

Panic struck deep in her stomach, a vise clamping it together to the point of pain. She had no idea who Peeta was or how he could possibly know she had lied about her identity— much less why a fib about her name would anger him. Anxiously, she felt the sides of her hips, searching for a pocket where she might have stashed her ID.

“Don’t move,” he warned her. “I know what you are. You’re a monster.” He paused and inhaled deeply, a shaky breath that made him sound as scared as she was. “You’re a _bitch_.”

“What’s happening?” she croaked, searching for her voice but not being able to find where it had gone. “I don’t understand.”

He shot her a withering look, no longer caring about the road before them. Her eyes, pitch black as the night, met his, her lower lip trembling from the waves of terror that were beginning to wash over her. “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?” he snapped, ripping the rabbit’s foot from the rearview mirror and blindly throwing it at her. “Acting like you don’t even know where I got this. Like you didn’t _fucking_ give it to me.”

She gasped wordlessly, uncomprehending.

His voice was like an ice bath, a raging river so forceful it could sweep land, houses, trees, the world itself, out to sea. “Did you _ever_ love me, Katniss? Or was it always going to be Gale?”

With eyes wide she asked him, “Who’s Katniss?”

As she spoke the name, she at last understood how she knew Peeta, where she had seen his face before. He was on television everywhere. The infamous Peeta Mellark. She felt so stupidly ashamed of herself for allowing her life to come to this. Without thinking, she brought her hands to her neck and touched the same spot he’d touched on _her_.

They’d found her body in the Skykomish, in a gravel bed where the river met the Snohomish. No one had found the mechanic’s body, but by now it would have probably made its way into the Sound, a human reduced to chum.

“Listen,” she said, trying to sound reasonable and calm. “I did lie earlier about my name. I— I gave you the name of my sister.”

She shivered as his eyes locked on her. She’d thought they were warm and radiant, but now she saw they were as harsh and unforgiving as the tide that battered the beach. She went on, trying to explain before he did something rash, something that couldn’t be undone. “My name is Johanna Mason. I’m not from Gold Bar, Peeta. I’m from _Panem_.”

Thinking quickly, she made herself as small and vulnerable as she could. She began to cry, hot tears scalding her face that she wiped away with shaking fingers. “Y-you don’t h-have to d-do this,” she beseeched him. “It was j-just an honest mistake.”

She thought about Katniss Everdeen’s face, how she didn’t look a thing like the dead girl.

She begged him because she had no other weapon, “I want to to go home, Peeta. You can still take me home.” She realized, possibly too late, that she didn’t want to die. Not here, not like this. Maybe not ever. She didn’t care that she didn’t have a home. Or a family anymore. She just knew she didn’t want it to end here. If she died now there would be no one to mourn her.

Her knees began quaking as he braked and cut the engine. He slumped over the steering wheel, his shoulders shaking as he sobbed Katniss’ name over and over, a well-worn prayer that brought him no comfort or absolution.

“I’m so sorry, Katniss,” he moaned, openly weeping. “I would have stayed with you always. Always.”

She had one shot. Without looking she reached for the handle of the car door, unbuckling herself and forcing the door open in one swift movement. She landed hard in the dirt, her knees giving out beneath her, before he realized she was gone. Peeta howled, an inhuman, frantic sound, as he realized she had escaped.

She began running blindly into the forest, the mud sucking the heels off her feet, the moss lashing across her face, tangling itself round her and holding on like the drowned hands of a dead girl.

In the silence of the night, deep in the pines, there were only her screams and his. She couldn’t tell where hers ended and his began. They mingled as one, a chorus of desperation and pain. Somewhere nearby a coyote joined them, a lonely, plaintive sound that beckoned them onward. It called to them: _Join me. Stay with me_.

She ran as fast as she could, pumping her arms furiously, dodging the massive trees, stumbling over fallen branches and sword ferns, clumsily advancing over the uneven terrain. The rain fell heavily upon her, sheets as thick and dark as blood. She gasped for air, choking on a fog that felt as poisonous as whatever had infected Peeta’s brain.

He trampled noisily through the undergrowth, and she could tell by the sound and by his heavy breathing that he was advancing on her quickly, steadily. One of his hands clamped onto her wrist, arresting her motion.

She tried to wrest it from his grasp, but he was too strong. “Let me go!” she snarled as he pulled her to the ground, falling on top of her.

“I can’t!” he moaned, sounding as tortured and lost as she was.

In the darkness, all she could see was his hand. She lunged forward with her mouth, biting him, tearing at his flesh. He howled pitifully and withdrew his hand, cradling it to his chest.

Taking advantage of his weakness, she kicked him, rolling him off her. She stumbled to her feet, but Peeta reached out with his uninjured hand, clasping her around the ankle, dragging her back down to the earth.

In the distance, a bolt of lightning struck a tree, illuminating for one second the forest around them. Everything glowed a sinister blue— the pallid color of Peeta’s eyes, the color of the water that had swallowed the bodies he’d dropped into its depths. The water, the torturous water. The last thing she would ever see or know.

“You’re a monster, Katniss!” Peeta cried, knocking his injured hand furiously against his head, blindly battering himself.

She tried crawling away, her hands seeking purchase on the forest floor. Her fingers sifted through the loose dirt, frantic and searching, until they brushed upon something cool and metal-

 

\-------

 

_Finis._


End file.
